Back in the day, the FORTRAN standards committee reviewed a technical proposal called "Letter O considered harmful". I used to be able to find a link to the text of this proposal on the net, but it seems to have disappeared since the last time I looked for it -- the link disappeared off the relevant Wikipedia page and the only Google hits for the term are references back to Wikipedia. Does anyone happen to know a good repository of information about FORTRAN so that I could track it down, or even better, have a link to the proposal itself?

never heard of that. is it because it can be easily mistaken for 0?
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ClaudiuOct 10 '10 at 21:20

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@Claudiu Among other things, yes. It was also suspect because programmers could write GOTO statements using that letter.
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estanfordOct 10 '10 at 21:22

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This is a joke that could be applied to any programming language. I propose that the letter "I" be deleted from Java (randomly selected) become of its similarity to the numeral "1".
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M. S. B.Oct 11 '10 at 6:21

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@Rook It's relevant to the FORTRAN language because the proposal showed up at a FORTRAN committee meeting. I figured that if anyone knows where to find the proposal or a repository of proposals from FORTRAN's historical, record, it would be people familiar with the FORTRAN language.
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estanfordOct 11 '10 at 10:20

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@M.S.B. See? If we ban all characters, we can get rid of bad code forever! ;-) I'm mainly interested in finding the proposal for historical reasons, though. It's an important piece of FORTRAN folklore that looks like it may disappear from the record, and maybe already has.
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estanfordOct 11 '10 at 11:39

2 Answers
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I think this is the guy to ask: Bruce A. Martin. He seems* to be the one who originally posted it on Wikipedia, and he puts himself as working at Brookhaven (where the article was circulated) at the same time.

The citation he gives on Wikipedia for the article is:

X3J3 post-meeting distribution for meeting held at Brookhaven National Laboratory in November 1976.

(* the user page for the user that posted it links to the website as being their material)

This is a good lead. There's some suggestion on Open Standards (open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG5/3054) that the Letter O proposal may even have been written by him, or at least a proposal of the same name. I'm looking into it now.
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estanfordOct 12 '10 at 10:20

Funnily enough, if you Google for "Letter o considered harmful" and restrict the search range to pre-2004, I get the result j3-fortran.org ... but I've yet to find any mention on the site :)
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PorgesOct 12 '10 at 10:41

It does get mentioned on Wikipedia -- in multiple places, even -- but there used to be a link on the Wiki pages that went straight to the text of the proposal. That's the sort of thing I'm after.
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estanfordOct 10 '10 at 21:24

@bzlm I've been reviewing the change histories for a while now, but haven't had any luck. The last time I was able to find the link was years ago, so there's a lot of ground I need to cover to find the change.
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estanfordOct 10 '10 at 21:29

I consider this most likely a joke/folklore. I can't recall it from the distant past (70's)
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MikeAinOzOct 10 '10 at 21:31

It was a tongue-and-cheek commentary on the great flowering of "X considered harmful" articles that came out after Dijkstra's original, as I recall. Someone submitted the article as a technical proposal that was read during the same committee session where the name FORTRAN77 was decided on.
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estanfordOct 10 '10 at 21:37